


(beneath these metaphors) I want you literally

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Gossip Girl
Genre: Banter, Denial of Feelings, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Gossip Girl AU, Happy Ending, Light Angst, Slow Burn, Writer Fitz, endgame Fitzsimmons and Tripskye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 22:09:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7192817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are two things that Leo Fitz knows about Jemma Simmons.  First of all, she is the golden girl of the Upper East Side, ruling with a sweet smile and an iron fist.  Second, she hates him with a fiery passion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(beneath these metaphors) I want you literally

**Author's Note:**

> Originally prompted by jemmasimmuns over on Tumblr, who requested FS as Dan and Blair from Gossip Girl and got me so inspired that I had to write a full fic of this. (Please note that I'm using Skye instead of Daisy here because her characterization is probably closer to season one Skye than season three Daisy.)
> 
> Title from the Wombats' "Emoticons"

There are two things that Leo Fitz knows about Jemma Simmons. First of all, she is the golden girl of the Upper East Side, ruling with a sweet smile and an iron fist. Second, she hates him with a fiery passion.

He only meets Jemma Simmons because Skye Johnson gets spotted by the anonymous bloggers at the Rising Tide at Grand Central Station with her suitcases and comes slamming back into his life like a hurricane. Not that she'd ever really been in his life in the first place. She'd been waves of dark hair spilling down her back, the curve of a wicked smile, half-phrased sentences and fragile metaphors in his notebooks. She's been his dream girl since he first thought to dream about girls but she's never been more then a dream, never real enough to take on proper definition in the stories he's tried to write about her. Then she runs into him—quite literally—on the sidewalk outside the Boba Guys and Fitz is a goner.

“I know you!” she declares and beams down at him. “You're one of the St. Jude's guys, right? Wait, don't tell me your name—I bet I know it. It starts with an L, right? Liam? Luke? Leo?”

“Leopold, actually. I go by Fitz,” Fitz says with a wince. “Much easier for everyone.”

“Fitz. Okay.” Skye lets her eyes sweep up and down him. “Tell me, Fitz, how did you get so nice going to St. Jude's?”

“Nice? I...um, I'm from Brooklyn?” he offers. He can't think of anything to say that won't make him look like a complete idiot and his tongue feels so thick in his mouth that he's not sure he could say the right thing if he came up with it. “Way out in the back of beyond. I'm still surprised that the Upper East Side doesn't rise up in revolt to prevent me from passing into its hallowed halls every time I walk into it.”

“It's not all it's cracked up to be,” Skye says and if he didn't know better, he would swear that there's something sad buried in her eyes that wasn't there before. But Skye Johnson doesn't do sad, according to all the stories he's heard about her. She does champagne and parties and dancing until the sun comes up and everything he doesn't want to admit that he likes about the world he got thrust into. The Upper East Side is still a strange place to him, three years after getting shoved onto the subway and sent across the river and far uptown, a world where people casually spend thousands of dollars on handbags and stare at him when he mentions that he takes the subway. He hadn't wanted to go to St. Jude's, even when he got the scholarship, had wanted to stay within the cozy confines of the world he knew. Leo Fitz isn't good with adventures that don't take place within the pages of a book or the frames of a film and even in the heart of New York society, he tucks himself away where people's eyes can pass right through him. (He's been the librarian's favorite student since freshman year.) 

“Look, do you want to get boba?” he blurts out. “It's really good here.”

“I'd love to get boba. I haven't had it in ages,” Skye says and makes a ridiculous face. “They don't have it out in the wilds of suburban Connecticut.”

Later, he'll try to break it all down, see where exactly he went right and when he went wrong. What it possibly could have been about him, about his messy curls and wrinkled flannel over his faded Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy t-shirt, that made Skye take a second look and then a third one. Later, he'll try to figure out how he can make her fall in love with him again. And later still, he'll realize that it was never anything he did. Skye was always going to do what she wanted, to plunge forward without thinking twice about the consequences. It's not a bad thing, but it's not always a good thing either. It's just the way she is.

But in that moment, all he knows is that Skye Johnson is willing to get boba with him and she's even more indelible in person than in the unfinished sentences that populate the edges of his school notebooks, so bright and so alive that no one could ever want to forget her. Her best friend is indelible too, as he finds out, but in the way that makes him wish he _could_ forget her.

Fitz meets Jemma Simmons properly when Skye drags him along to brunch. It is an unmitigated disaster.

 

Jemma loves her best friend, she really does. She loves Skye even when she disappears for months on end, even when she draws the attention that Jemma has to work so hard to keep with nothing more than a grin and a flip of her hair, and even when she brings a messy-haired boy from the middle of nowhere along to their regularly scheduled Sunday brunch.

“Fitz, this is Jemma. Jemma, Fitz,” Skye chirps as she slides into a booth across from Jemma, hand firmly clasped in Fitz's.

“Not your usual type, is he?” Jemma says and arches one eyebrow as she keeps her gaze firmly fixed on the menu. He's so _scruffy_ , wrinkled shirt and ridiculously curly hair that reminds her a bit of a Muppet, worse even than the performance artist Skye had dated for a few weeks last summer, the one who had stood on the steps of the Met naked to protest global warming. (She'd pitied the steps of the Met, really.)

“He's sitting right here,” Fitz says loudly.

“I'm perfectly aware of that,” Jemma shrugs and shuts her menu with a snap. “I'll ask you questions when I feel like it.”

She knows that she shouldn't be this petty, deep down, knows that she shouldn't pick him apart piece by piece until he comes undone. Knows, too, that this isn't always the Jemma she wants to be. But she knows exactly what's necessary to keep on ruling the Upper East Side. She's calculated the exact worth of each sharp glance and scheming plan that makes everyone afraid to cross her and now she's so deep in the heart of the experiment that she's not sure who she'd be without it. Besides, there's a little (more than a little) part of her that likes it. She's good at it and there's nothing more intoxicating for Jemma Simmons than being good at something. 

“The French toast is really good here,” Skye tells Fitz, changing the subject with a complete and utter lack of subtlety. “Especially if you get it stuffed with Nutella.”

Fitz's eyes light up at that and Jemma sighs. He couldn't even have the decency to like a better brand of chocolate hazelnut spread.

“Skye doesn't have good taste in men,” Jemma informs him when the other girl steps outside to take a phone call. “I mean, _Brooklyn_? Really?”

“We have good coffee in Brooklyn,” Fitz protests. “Lots of food trucks.”

“Do I look like I've ever been to a food truck?” Jemma spears a piece of Eggs Benedict ferociously. Everyone knows that you're not supposed to defend Brooklyn, of all places.

“Do I look like I care?”

Jemma smiles just a little bit at that. Most of Skye's boys are scared of her right away. “Tell me, do you live in some loft decorated with vinyl records and the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald? Maybe you even have a typewriter?”

“The typewriter is an antique. And it has a name,” he says defensively. Jemma smiles again. This is more fun than she thought it would be. She has to wait a full two minutes before he admits the typewriter's name to her. (It's Lola.)

They have a pattern after that. She doesn't _like_ him, of course—she's quite definitive on the subject—and he doesn't like her but they rather like disliking each other. Skye drags him along to parties like he's the season's most recent handbag and he stands in a corner and looks puzzled at perfectly ordinary things like champagne fountains. She has the feeling that he's taking them all in and storing them away in some corner of his brain and it irritates Jemma to no end. She's supposed to be the one who sees everything, who knows people better than they know themselves. 

“You should be dancing with your girlfriend,” she tells him at one party, drifting up behind him when she's making one of her circuits of the room. (Really, she's avoiding him, the boy that lurks in the shadows of the room and of her mind, who summons up all the dark things inside her that she doesn't like but does when she's with him.)

“Can't dance,” Fitz shrugs and taps one finger against the side of his glass. “And I'd like to stay out of the gossip blogs for at least one night. Not-so-breaking news: Lonely Boy can't dance!”

“That's what she's calling you? How unoriginal.” Jemma frowns. No one knows who runs the Upper East Side's leading gossip blog, but everyone reads it religiously, retweeting every piece of gossip it parcels out and frantically scrolling through its Instagram. Jemma says that she doesn't care but late at night, alone in the middle of her massive bed, she reads it until her vision blurs and her phone runs out of battery. Not reading isn't an option if she wants to stay where she is. 

“But accurate. What's your nickname?” Fitz asks.

“Me? I'm the Queen, of course,” Jemma says, like she could never be anything else. “You should go dance with your girlfriend before someone else does.”

“Whatever you say, Your Majesty.” Fitz dips a bow in her general direction, sarcasm dripping from every inch of him, and goes to find Skye. She's in the middle of it all, bathed in the colored lights, face tilted up towards the ceiling like she's looking for salvation there, but when Skye sees Fitz, a smile breaks across her face and she leans in to kiss him, draping her arms over his shoulders and pulling him close. His face lights up and he looks at her like there's no one else in the room. If Skye's the sun, Fitz is caught irretrievably in her orbit and Jemma can't help feeling jealous. Not that she wants him like that. Not that she ever would. She's just jealous because Trip, despite his brilliant smiles and sweet kisses and the peonies he brings her in spring, has never looked at her like that. 

And there he is, crossing the room to her. Her handsome, accomplished, perfect boyfriend. He is what she's wanted for as long as she can remember. Even when they were all little, cooped up together in the spare room of someone's penthouse under the supervision of a bored French au pair, Trip was always the one whose attention she wanted. And somehow, he always gave it to her. They didn't start dating until sophomore year of high school, when he leaned against the door of her locker and asked her what she was doing Friday night, but she's always known that it was going to be him and her in the end. But now she can't shake the feeling that there's something wrong, as he bends down to kiss her and pulls away too quickly.

“Hey, are you all right?” she asks lightly and cups his face in one hand. “I thought you were going to meet me here when the party started so we could walk in together.”

“Shit, I'm really sorry about that,” Trip tells her, wincing, and slides an arm around her waist. “Family meeting. I couldn't get out of it till late. Look, do you want to get out of here and grab some late-night dinner after this? I heard about this new burger place downtown—I'll buy you a milkshake and an order of fries.”

“Big spender,” Jemma teases. Trip could take her out to dinner every night at a Michelin-starred restaurant and his parents would just shrug when they saw the credit card bill, but he's not the kind of person who likes things just because everyone else tells him to. That's part of what Jemma loves about him, how he's so completely, effortlessly sure in who he is. She's worked all her life for everything she has, from the hours she spends on writing essays and doing problem sets every night to the hour and a half it takes her to get ready in the morning, and she can't help being fascinated by how simple he makes it all seem.

“Hey, anything for you, girl” he says and smiles at her, wide and easy. “Maybe we'll go really crazy and get pie too.”

“That sounds great.” Jemma beams up at him. “We could maybe go back to my apartment afterward? My mom's out of town for the weekend.”

Trip's arm goes a little slack around her waist when she says it and he seems about to say something but then he just bends down to kiss her again. Jemma tells herself that everything is just fine and shuts her eyes when she kisses him back so she won't scan his face for clues. Sometimes she finds herself staring at him like she's got him on a slide under a microscope, examining each piece of his laugh and his smile and wondering what it is she can't see. He's been acting strange for the past six months, especially when she brings up sex. Even if it's just in casual conversation, something in him goes sideways and slips away from her and no matter how quickly she grabs at it, it always goes flying away into thin air. 

“We don't have to if you don't want to,” Jemma adds. “I'm happy to see you either way.”

“Me too.” And when he tells her that he loves her, it sounds as true as it ever has.

They don't sleep together that night. Or the next, or the one after that. When Trip walks her home, he kisses her chastely at her door and leaves before she can even tell him that it's getting late. She's had the rose petals and the candles stashed away in her room for weeks now, to the point where she keeps on having to order new rose petals every week. Clearly there's something wrong with her. Something that she's not doing or saying right. Something that she can fix. So she goes to talk to Trip about it and everything falls apart.

They're at a party and she's a little drunk, so maybe that's why she does it. “I want us to be each others' firsts,” she says, hands laced through his as they sit on someone's rooftop terrace. She pulled him away from the party almost as soon as they got there, her mind too full to even think about making small talk over cocktails and remixed pop songs. “And if you don't want that, that's okay. But you just have to tell me that, because I can't figure out what's going on with you and—”

“Jemma, I'm not a virgin,” he blurts out. “I'm so sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am. It was at the Barton wedding, it was a mistake, I was drunk and stupid and I--”

“Who was it?” she demands, mouth tight and white around the edges. 

“I don't know if--”

“Just tell me who it was,” she snaps.

“Skye,” he says. And this is the thing that'll kill her afterward, that'll send the knife twisting into her gut months later whenever she thinks about it. For the briefest fraction of a second, when Trip says Skye's name, he looks like she's always wanted him to look at her.

“You're...you're lying, right?” She hates the way that her voice wavers at the end of her question. “It's not true. It was someone else and you're lying because it's someone I really hate and you don't want me to know and...”

“I'm so sorry, Jemma,” he repeats urgently. “We never meant for it to happen and I—I wish it never had happened, okay? I don't know what I was thinking and--”

“Clearly, you weren't thinking at all,” she says. Her voice is as brittle as glass and she thinks that if she says anything more, she might shatter into pieces. It's like something out of one of those stupid teen movies she and Skye used to watch when they were in middle school, passing a bowl of popcorn between them and rolling their eyes at every new plot twist. Her boyfriend and her best friend. Jemma almost wants to laugh.

“Please, just tell me what I can do to make this okay. I know I messed up, I really do. But I promise I'll do my best to fix this.” Trip reaches out to take her hand and she flinches back. “It didn't mean anything, I swear.”

Skye swings open the door just in time to hear the end of Trip's sentence. And Jemma's seen Skye every way she can imagine, but she's never seen her look quite so sad.

“You...you said that you weren't going to tell her,” Skye says slowly. 

“Why do you always want everything I have?” Jemma says in a small, quiet voice. “Couldn't you just let me have this?”

“I didn't...I never meant...You have to let me explain, Jem,” Skye looks dazed and lost and Jemma remembers how Skye looked in elementary school, whenever her mom and her dad were too busy fighting to remember to pick her up on time. Her best friend is always surrounded by people but right now, standing under the lights in a thin silver dress, she looks very alone. Jemma isn't going to say anything, she really isn't, but then she sees the way that Trip softens when he looks at Skye and the words come flying out of her mouth before she really thinks about them.

“You've already done enough,” Jemma's voice could cut glass and from the way that Skye flinches back, she thinks that it just might have.

That's when Skye turns, slams the door behind her, and runs out. Trip looks back at Jemma, mouths “I'm sorry”, and goes after Skye. Skye, not her. Jemma almost runs after him, but that's not the kind of thing that Jemma Simmons does. Instead she glides through the party, carefully scattering glances and hellos wherever she goes, until she finds the back steps and prepares herself to collapse. Only Leo Fitz is already there and from the shell-shocked set of his shoulders, she thinks that he knows too. 

“So,” Jemma sinks down onto the step beside Fitz and draws her knees up to her chest. She feels very small and very young and not at all like herself, like all she wants is to lean against someone and have them tell her that everything is going to be okay. But there's only two people who would tell her that and one of them is out chasing after the other instead of her. 

“So,” he echoes her and sighs. “Your boyfriend slept with my girlfriend.”

“It appears so.” She refuses to cry in front of _Leopold Fitz_ , of all people. Instead she keeps her eyes firmly focused on the deli across the street and her back ramrod straight, hoping that he can't see her face. 

“Are you okay?” he asks and inches closer to the step.

“No,” she says and is horrified to hear her voice shake. “I think I might not be.”

“Good. I'm not okay either.”

“It's not like you were dating her when she slept with my boyfriend,” Jemma points out and hates the sharp tone that her voice takes on. “Objectively, my situation is a whole lot worse.”

“I don't think there's anything objective about this. It's not that it bothers me that Skye's slept with a bunch of people,” Fitz says defensively when she arches an eyebrow at him. “I mean, it does bother me sometimes, but I'm trying really hard not to let it. It's just...it shouldn't be someone that I know, okay?”

“It's always someone that you know,” she explains. “That's the way it works.”

“He's so perfect ,” Fitz sulks and screws up his face. “It could be his middle name. Antoine Perfect Triplett.”

“I think you'd like him if you got to know him,” Jemma says thoughtfully. “Most people do. It's impossible not to.” Fitz just grumbles in response and she thinks that maybe he'll understand it all some day. He'll write it down in simple prose on the pale blue lines of the notebooks he seems to carry around wherever he goes. She's been trying to understand the world she lives in all her life, but maybe it takes the distance of the Brooklyn Bridge to really make sense of it all, the parties and dresses and rumors that leap from person to person like wildfire. And for the longest time, she's wanted to be right at the heart of it, the pulsing electric place where everyone comes and goes, and she knows that there she'll be able to see everything. Jemma craves understanding like other people crave the sting of vodka or the press of someone's else bare skin against theirs. Some days she can even taste the longing on her tongue, thick and sweet and strangely addictive, and as Fitz runs a hand through his hair and stares out at the street, he looks like he might know the taste of it too.

“She loves you, you know,” Jemma adds after a while. “I'm not sure why, but she does.”

“How flattering,” Fitz says dryly.

“I don't do flattering. But Skye...she smiles a lot more when she's around you.” And despite everything, Jemma loves seeing her best friend smile. So she tells him to go figure it out with Skye before she has to set her minions on him.

 

It works itself out in the end, much to Fitz's surprise. Skye calls him late that night, her voice brimming over with the tears she's trying to hold in, and asks him if they can have breakfast tomorrow for her to explain. He tells her that she can come over tonight and holds her in his red checked flannel sheets while she cries. 

“I haven't seen my dad in years, you know,” she tells him. “He took off when I was little, but at least he sends me postcards. Mostly of flowers and he doesn't write much on the back, but it's not like I see my mom much either. She runs this sanctuary for troubled teens and it's great work and everyone tells me how generous she is with her time and how lucky I am to have her as my mom. But sometimes I think she's a better mom to them than she is to me. Isn't that a terrible thing to feel?”

“I...I think that sometimes you can't choose how you feel. And if it's real, then you—you can't make it unreal and that's okay. You're allowed to be mad at her,” Fitz says. He's about 95% sure that he's fucking this up, because his best words are always the ones that he types rather than the ones he says out loud, but Skye just presses herself into his side and lets him keep on talking. “I mean, if your family doesn't want to spend time with you, then they're idiots. You're pretty extraordinary.”

Skye beams up at him and suddenly she's the golden girl again, the one who sends light rushing through his veins and sets his heart thumping in his chest, before her face falls and she presses herself even closer to him. “Jemma's mad at me,” she says in a small voice. “I don't know how to fix it.”

“Did you try saying that you were sorry?” he asks patiently. That's the moment when he realizes that Jemma and Skye are a package deal. For as long as Skye is in his life, Jemma will be there too, rolling her eyes at him and telling him what to do in perfectly enunciated syllables. It's not as horrible a thought as he imagined it might be. Of course, it's still more horrifying than the last three Paranormal Activity movies put together but it's not unbearable, even when he remembers the way Jemma stabs lettuce with her fork whenever she tells him that his opinions on literature are irredeemably wrong. 

Because the thing is that she loves Skye like no one else does. He's seen her secure Skye the last designer dress left in her size by effortlessly distracting the three other high-strung Upper East Side residents who were eying it and get late-night pizza even if she has a test the next morning and proofread Skye's essays on _The Sun Also Rises_ with a bright pink highlighter and a red pen and hold on to Skye when she cries. When they're not fighting, and even sometimes when they are, Jemma makes her happy. Before Fitz really knew her, he thought that Skye was always sunny, cloudless and uncomplicated, but now he knows better. She's bright most of the time, endlessly determined and cracking silly jokes, but there's moments when her face darkens and only Jemma can cheer her up with a perfectly timed shopping trip or coffee date. Jemma would never say it, but from the way her face softens and she lets her perfect updos come undone around Skye, he thinks that Jemma needs Skye too. Fitz blinks and frowns up at the ceiling, wondering when he started to know so much about Jemma Simmons. _How_ he started to know so much about Jemma Simmons. 

“Of course I tried to apologize. She doesn't want to hear it.” Skye sulks and pulls the blankets up over her face. “She won't answer my texts or pick up my calls and when I went to see her, she pretended that she wasn't home.”

“She will eventually,” Fitz says and strokes her back until she uncurls from her tight little ball of misery. “You and Jemma love each other, right? Like she's your sister. You'll work it out.”

“I'm not always great at apologizing,” Skye admits. It's true. She tends to forge ahead and think about the consequences later, whether she's hopping a fence, ordering the strangest thing on the menu at the hole-in-the-wall she insists on going to, or programming a virus to take out her calculus teacher's computer on the day there's a test. Not because she doesn't know how to do every problem on the test, but because she just doesn't feel like taking it. And Fitz doesn't want to but he understands how it could have happened, Skye and Trip. Sometimes, late at night when he can't sleep, he can even see his imagined version of it playing out: Skye tipping a flute of champagne or four down her throat, the sway of her dress around her hips, Trip's hands in her dark hair back when it was long, her legs wrapped around his waist...Sometimes, Fitz wishes he didn't have an overactive imagination. He's not allowed to be jealous of any of Skye's previous hookups, according to the rules he made for himself when they first started dating, but there's something about this one that just tugs at him. Maybe it was the look on Jemma's face when she found out, the way she tried to keep herself from crumpling inward. Jemma Simmons is a princess and she shouldn't look like anything else. It skews the composition of the picture.

Skye falls asleep soon after as her eyes shut in the midst of detailing how she's going to get Jemma to forgive her but it takes Fitz longer. He stares up at the ceiling as he thinks about Skye and Jemma and Jemma and Skye and tries to come up with ways to fix it for her. He's absolute shit at it. For someone with a bad temper, Fitz has gotten into surprisingly few fights in his life, maybe because he's too much of a coward to actually say all the things he thinks inside his head about the people he goes to school with, maybe because Bobbi and Mack always hauled him back before he could say anything too stupid. For a moment, he thinks about crawling out of bed and calling his older sister but then he remembers that it's the middle of the night in California too and she probably has to get up early for soccer practice the next morning. (Bobbi's on a full scholarship at Stanford, where she's probably eating her weight in sushi and breaking the hearts of both the male and female halves of the freshman class. Fitz would never tell her, but he misses her desperately.)

Skye is pressed tight against his side, there and warm and real, and yet when he wakes up in the morning and reaches for his notebook, he almost writes a sentence about Jemma before he scrubs it out so violently that the eraser nearly snaps in half. She's an interesting study, with her sharp edges and soft curls, but Fitz thinks that he'll never be able to fit his pencil around the lines of her. She overwhelms him, and not in a good way.

Case in point: five days later, when Skye and Jemma make up after a long tearful talk and a box full of the giant cookies from Levain Bakery, Jemma appears at his and Skye's dinner date and tells him that he needs to cut his hair.

 

Jemma has managed to convince herself that everything is okay. She's talked to Skye and she's talked to Trip and she's talked for so long about it that she never wants to hear the words Barton wedding ever again. If she just believes in it hard enough, she can make herself believe that the fact that her best friend slept with her boyfriend is totally fine. Skye apologizes the way that only Skye can when she shows up on Jemma's doorstep with baked goods and a long, tearful speech. Trip is an even better boyfriend than before. He patiently watches all the old Audrey Hepburn movies that she loves and brings the popcorn, he stands by her side at every party, he plans elaborate dates at the Met and in Central Park, and he kisses her goodnight under the streetlight outside her building like he means it. And she supposes that he does. 

In the end, that's what really stings. They're good people who did a bad thing, nothing more. Jemma doesn't know if she could always say the same thing about herself. Sometimes, when she's scheming to ensure that she'll be the one to get into Columbia or criticizing some hapless freshman's outfit, she likes the rush of power just a little too much. Late at night, she texts Skye: _Am I a bad person?_

Skye's reply comes back almost instantly. _Scheming? Yes. But that's part of why I love u, Jem. U r amazing and u better know that._

When she asks Trip, curled up on his bed under the Harvard blankets that belonged to his great-uncle, he pulls her even closer and asks her if she really thinks that. 

“We all screw up sometimes, sure,” he says and twists one of her curls around his finger. “But I think you're pretty great.”

“Last week, I paid off a cab driver to ensure that Jane Foster missed her slot for presenting at a science conference that Columbia was hosting,” Jemma practically wails. “I don't even know why I did that.”

“And later, you told her where one of the Columbia professors gets coffee so she could corner them and present her research,” Trip adds. “You're not nearly as bad as you like to think you are, Jemma Simmons.”

“Hey!” she protests. “Just the other day, Fitz called me the original devil in Prada.”

“Prada is so last season,” Trip says, in his best imitation of her voice and she laughs and pounces, pinning him down to the bed as she kisses him. Then he's pulling her on top of him, hands sliding beneath the silky fabric of her top, and she's kissing him and sunlight is streaming in through the windows of his room and everything is all right for now. They slept together for the first time a few weeks ago and it was...good. A little underwhelming, as she shut her eyes and gritted her teeth through the first minutes of it, but it's getting better every time. _They're_ getting better.

Yet even when everything seems to be okay, Jemma can't help feeling like there's something lurking just around the corner, waiting for her. (Not something, _someone_.) And eventually, he'll catch up to her, with his wicked smile and dark promises, and she'll let herself be caught. Because Trip is too good for her and everyone knows it. Except maybe for Leo Fitz.

“You made Trip buy that suit, right?” he asks at some social event, sliding into place beside her.

“How did you know?” It's a gorgeous suit, slim-cut and charcoal gray, and they went shopping for it yesterday.

“It's nicer than anything else he owns. Whenever we hang out, he wears expensive t-shirts that are meant to look cheap.” Fitz wrinkles his nose. “Do they actually sew the frayed bits in by hand?”

“As opposed to all your flannels that are actually cheap?” she snaps but her heart isn't quite in it.

Trip waves at her, beckoning her over to where he's networking with some senators, and she feels pride swell in her chest at how ridiculously presidential he looks. Trip's grandfather was a war hero and a congressman for New York and despite Trip's easy-going nature and seeming inability to wheel and deal, his family keeps on hoping that he'll be next in the political dynasty. Jemma doesn't know whether or not she should help them. Right now, all Trip says he wants is to backpack through Europe and win the lacrosse championship but on the weekends he tutors disadvantaged kids in math and she knows that if he ended up sitting on the oak benches of Congress, he'd do great things. So she doesn't take one side or the other but she still talks him into going to meet-and-greet events and whispers relevant details about key political players in his ear.

“You're like a nice version of Lady Macbeth,” Fitz tells her. “You get these schemy eyes.” He gestures vaguely around her face and Jemma thinks that his fingers are probably aching for a pencil. Fitz is always writing, even if it's just on paper napkins in the awful diners he and Skye go to, and he can't seem to keep his hands still. Lack of concentration, probably. It's a pity—he'd be brilliant if he cared half as much about dissecting frogs as he does about overblown metaphors and foreshadowing. As it is, he's high enough in the class rankings at St. Jude's to make the other boys eye him enviously in the hallways. 

“Was that supposed to be a compliment?” Jemma steps away from the wall and readies herself to go over to Trip, setting down her drink and smoothing out her skirts.

“Yeah.” Fitz shrugs. “You're good for Trip, you know. If he ends up being the mayor of New York, he'll have to thank you in one of his speeches. I mean, really his ghostwriters will, because you know his family will hire them but--”

“Most people wouldn't say that,” she says quietly and tilts her head to one side. Fitz is actually wearing clothing that matches tonight and he's made some kind of attempt at taming his irrepressible hair. Skye must be working on him.

“Well, most people are stupid.”

Later that night, kicking off her heels and crawling into bed, she remembers the little smirk on Fitz's face when he said it and grins up at the ceiling. They've reached a proper truce, now that it seems Skye is keeping him around for a while. If she ever leaves them alone, they bicker and spar and it's more entertaining than it should be.

“You're reading Kerouac?” she asks him with a raised eyebrow outside some benighted coffee shop in Brooklyn, where they're both waiting for Skye.

“What's wrong with Kerouac?” Fitz says and turns a page with a determined snap. “Don't you want to find someone who burns like a yellow Roman candle?'

“The problem isn't what's wrong with Kerouac, it's where to start,” Jemma sighs. “And I happen to like my friends unburnt, thank you very much.”

They argue pleasantly about literature for the next fifteen minutes until Skye shows up, blue scarf knotted tight around her neck and spouting apologies as she clambers out of a cab. After a while, they've become used to waiting for her—on park benches, in cafes, on the steps of theaters minutes before the show is supposed to start, in the school courtyards just as the bell rings. (Jemma is painfully punctual and Fitz is used to giving himself an extra forty-five minutes for when the subway inevitably breaks down.) He never seeks her out on purpose and she'd deny it until she went hoarse if anyone suggested that she looks for him some cold winter morning. Instead they just drift together in all the in-between moments, the ones where no one's watching her and there's nothing to be gotten out of it. They're not friends, of course (the thought is positively horrifying) but they're not _not_ friends.

That's what Jemma tells Skye over breakfast. “He's not the absolute worst of your boyfriends,” Jemma pronounces. 

“You make it sound like I've had so many,” Skye protests, then breaks into a wide grin. “Which I totally have. Jiaying was horrified when she started counting them up.”

“Jiaying doesn't get to be horrified if she's never around. Are you sure you don't want to come stay with us?” Jemma wheedles. “May's been trying to get you to join in on morning tai chi for ages.” Jemma's mom loves Skye, even if she'd never admit it.

“I like having the apartment to myself. You'd never let me sit around in yoga pants and eat Cheez-Its while watching the Food Network and trying to hack into NASA.”

“Because I am trying to culture you,” Jemma says and mock-turns up her nose. “It's a lifelong process.”

“Are you saying that Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives isn't a crucial part of our culture? You wound me, Jemma Simmons. Shot through the heart, and you're to blame,” Skye quotes, completely straight-faced, and clutches a hand to her chest.

“No more diners, drive-ins, and dives,” Jemma says primly. “That place you made me go to near NYU looked like it had never seen an espresso machine in its life. Take the Brooklyn boy next time.”

“But you're so much more fun to hear complain. Fitz saves all his complaining for parties that I want to go to,” Skye says and frowns down at her coffee. “I had to turn down three invitations in the last two weeks.”

“You can always come with me to Kara's party next week if he doesn't want to go,” Jemma offers. “I can guarantee that I'll be better dressed than Brooklyn.”

“Don't worry, I have ways of talking him into it,” Skye adds, brightening again, and grins in a way that's probably meant to be suggestive. Jemma shudders at the thought. Skye has tried to volunteer details of her sex life several times but Jemma always declares that she prefers to think of Fitz as a sexless creature for her own peace of mind. She has a reputation to maintain, after all. 

Sometime in the spring, sitting in Central Park on a unseasonably warm day and mostly occupied with rereading The Age of Innocence, Jemma looks at Skye and Fitz attempting to fly a kite and makes a prediction. They'll break up in a few months, at the end of spring and before the real start of summer. As it turns out, she's right. She often is.

There's one thing that Jemma doesn't predict, however. She and Trip break up too. He's traveling for the summer, visiting some cousins whose father works at the embassy in Switzerland, while she stays here and prepares for Columbia in the fall. It's a perfectly polite, well-thought out breakup, one where they both agree it's the best thing to do. In some ways, it's not even a breakup at all. Just a break for the summer, the tantalizing possibility of getting back together in the fall still hovering in front of them. But it devastates her all the same.

“You're always going to be my first love, Jemma,” Trip tells her. But deep down in her bones, Jemma thinks that maybe they won't be each other's last loves. And somehow, someday that'll be okay. Just not right now.

She spends a full three days curled up under her comforter watching old movies and paging listlessly through academic journals until she ruthlessly yanks the curtains back from her windows, carefully curls her hair, puts on a full-skirted blue dress, and goes downtown to the Strand. It's where she's fled whenever she wants to lose herself in the written word for as long as she can remember. May brought her here on the first day of kindergarten, after she'd sobbed herself hoarse about the fact that everyone thought she was strange when she'd proposed collecting and examining some of the moss that grew behind the schoolyard. 

“People won't always agree with what you do,” her mother had said, pulling a picture book down from the shelf when Jemma gestured to it. “But the important thing is that you do.”

Now, she finds herself missing her mother fiercely. Melinda May had adopted Jemma nearly fifteen years ago and for as long as Jemma could remember, she'd been a steady, centering presence, the magnetic north that Jemma inevitably found herself pulled back towards. She hadn't been like the other mothers at Constance who peppered their children with kisses and chauffeured them from one extracurricular activity to the next, but she'd be there in record time if anything was wrong and ready with a steely glare for anyone who had wronged her daughter. She'd bought Jemma her first chapter books and her first microscope, rushed her to the doctor when she broke her arm after climbing a tree to collect specimens, and even offered up strategic suggestions when Jemma's reign had been threatened by an over-eager social climber named Lorelei who'd gone after Trip. 

Right now, May is away at a business conference and has trips scheduled for most of the summer but Jemma knows that if she asked, her mother would come home. She just doesn't want to be the kind of person who'd ask. So instead, she balances on a step ladder in her high heels and reaches for a paperback copy of a Margaret Atwood novel.

“I didn't have you pegged for the Atwood type, Simmons,” a voice says from behind her and she whirls around, nearly falling off the stool, to see Leo Fitz.

“I own a signed edition of _The Handmaid's Tale_ ,” she says and tries to look dignified as she descends and clutches her prize to her chest. “ _The Blind Assassin_ is next on my list.”

“I thought you didn't go anywhere below 34th street. Wait,” Fitz says, with a delighted look on his face. “Did you take the subway down here?”

“Of course not, Leopold. I still have some standards. What are you doing at the Strand?” she asks and narrows her eyes in an attempt to make out the stack of books in his arms. _Tender is the Night, Norwegian Wood, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The House of Mirth_ , the collected poetry of Sylvia Plath... “Never mind,” Jemma adds. “Clearly, you're picking up some light summer reading.”

“They're classics,” Fitz mutters halfheartedly. “I guess you heard that Skye and I broke up.”

“Along with half of Manhattan, yes. What happened?” Jemma doesn't look at him as she runs one finger along a row of Neil Gaiman novels and pulls out a copy of _Stardust_. The heartbreak in his eyes is uncomfortably familiar and if she's going to have anything in common with Leo Fitz, it'd better not be that look, the one of someone who's been left behind.

“Don't you already know? From Skye and your minions and from that stupid gossip blog?” Fitz scowls down at _Anna Karenina_. “Lonely Boy alone once again?”

“But I haven't heard your side of it.” She's curious, that's all. Skye didn't say much before she took off for California but it seems to have all happened when they were trapped in an elevator. It's not that she feels sorry for Fitz, all wide blue eyes and hair that's even more messy than usual—she'd predicted the end of it months before, after all. It's just strange now that it's really happened. Jemma's not sure if she and Fitz are allowed to be not friends now. Not that she wants to be not friends.

“It's not a very interesting story. We were stuck in an elevator, we argued, we talked, we argued some more, it's over. Skye's just...we don't belong in the same worlds. It took me a while to realize it but boys from Brooklyn and girls from the Upper East Side just aren't meant to mix. I—I wanted to be something on my own, you know?” Fitz looks up at her and she can't look away. “Not just Skye Johnson's boyfriend.”

“You will be,” Jemma blurts out. “I mean, you'll have to stop overusing some of those awful metaphors about girls whose eyes are like stars first. You might have to reconsider your sentence structure too.”

“You read my writing?” 

“Well, if you were going to leave it lying around Skye's apartment...” Jemma shrugs and looks dismissive. “Look, let's go get coffee and I'll tell you everything else that was wrong with it.”

The next week, she spots him at the movies, sitting three rows in front of her at a showing of The Philadelphia Story, and instead of doing what any sensible person would and ignoring his curly head, she picks up her popcorn and marches forward to sit next to him. They keep on running into each other that entire summer—at the Strand, in coffee shops, in movie theaters, walking across Central Park—until Jemma has to admit that maybe they're not running into each other by accident. There's something invigorating about Fitz's company, about the way he counters every one of her points with one of his own and refuses to let her win an argument easily, about how he waves his hands around in oddly precise gestures whenever he gets excited about something, about his odd habit of dipping his French fries in mustard and wrinkling his nose at her whenever she points it out. They talk about books and art and movies and science and everything in between until her cheeks are flushed pink with energy and her veins are buzzing. People usually can't keep up with her for too long, but she and Fitz are surprisingly well matched. It's like a summer fling, she tells herself, but with a friendship. Things will change once they go to college in the fall, her at Columbia and him at NYU. There'll practically be a whole island between them, won't there?

 

In one of his notebooks, Fitz calls it the Summer of Simmons and thinks that he doesn't mind the sound of it. He thinks that there's a story tucked away inside her angles, in the bell curve of her skirts and the sharp sweep of the headbands she always wears in her dark hair, in the rise and fall of her words and the light in her brown eyes. His first draft isn't the right kind of story, though. He has to tear it out of his notebook and hide it in his bottom desk drawer. 

“You talk a lot about a girl you don't like,” Bobbi says, pouring herself a cup of coffee and settling in at the table. Her flight got in late last night and she's still running on West Coast time but Fitz managed to lure her out of bed with the promise of their dad's secret pancakes recipe.

“That's because I really don't like her,” Fitz grumbles as he tries to flip a pancake. Their dad's much better at it but Phil's off on yet another mysterious business trip for his boss. (Never trust anyone who wears an eyepatch.)

“You know what I do with people I don't like? Avoid them. Or frame them for stealing food from the communal fridge.” His sister wants to be in the CIA and apparently navigating dorm politics at Stanford is good practice. 

“She's friends with Skye,” Fitz points out.

“And you broke up with Skye two months ago. Why are you still hanging out with her best friend?” 

Fitz opens his mouth, closes it, and concentrates very hard on flipping the next pancake.

“So do I get to meet her?” Bobbi asks. “If you're spending so much time with her.”

“I'm not,” Fitz mumbles. “At least I didn't mean to. No one else is around, okay?”

“Oh, I know all about what happens during long hot summers in the city when no one else is around.” Bobbi waggles her eyebrows at him. “That's how I met Hunter.” 

“When are you getting back together with him?” Fitz asks in a desperate bid to change the subject. If there's one thing that gets his big sister talking, it's her ex-boyfriend, the one she dated on and off for most of high school before he drunkenly proposed on the night before graduation and she promptly fled cross-country. The ring had ended up at the bottom of the Hudson. “I liked him better than Clint.” 

“ _Clint_ has a dog,” Bobbi argues and they're safely off the subject of Jemma. Fitz underestimated his sister though. Bobbi never forgets anything, whether it's who got to eat the last slice of their dad's peach pie when they were both twelve or the guy who wronged her in ninth grade, and a few days later she brings it up again when they're about to head off to the farmers' market. “Ask Jemma Simmons if she wants to come,” Bobbi says casually—too casually—when they're halfway to the door.

“Simmons doesn't go to farmers' markets. Too plebian. I told you she was absurd,” Fitz says in response to a question that Bobbi doesn't ask.

“Well, maybe we can get coffee afterward with her.” Bobbi smiles, with just a hint of teeth.

“She doesn't go to Brooklyn either. Do you think we should bring more resuable bags to the market? We didn't have enough for the honeydew last time.” Fitz couldn't care less about the honeydew but he has a bad feeling about the prospect of Bobbi meeting Jemma. Both of them are entirely too fond of being the person in charge. 

Bobbi finagles her way into meeting Jemma eventually, by securing an invitation to some elaborate gala her mother is hosting. Fitz also receives an invitation, gilded and embossed and looking remarkably out of place amongst the coupon circulars and electric bills that normally inhabit their doormat, and he's not going to go. He really isn't. Right up till the afternoon before the party, when he's having coffee with Jemma in some slow-brewed coffee place that makes her roll her eyes heavenwards. “Make sure you press your suit for tonight,” she says in between bites of scone.

“I'm not coming tonight,” he tells her.

“Of course you are. Why wouldn't you be?” Jemma blinks at him.

“I don't like parties. And,” he adds, delivering the winning point. “My suit is hopelessly wrinkled.”

“Those are both easily fixable problems. Do you have any idea how coveted these invitations are, Leopold? Last year someone actually committed identity theft trying to get into the May Industries gala. Besides, your sister's going,” Jemma says. “She can protect you from the terrifying inhabitants of the Upper East Side.”

“Is Skye going to be there?” He's heard that she's back from California and that she's brought a new boyfriend back along with her, but he's managed to avoid running into her for a full week now. Fitz would like to keep it that way, at least until he's dating someone else too. It's small and petty and a little ridiculous and he feels like that anyway. 

Jemma doesn't say anything in response, just stirs her coffee and rubs at her neck with one hand, and that's when he's sure that Skye is coming. He has all kinds of protests ready, mostly about how he doesn't want to be in the same room as his ex-girlfriend, some of them about how he's no fun at parties anyway, and another one about the suit. Yet somehow, Jemma sets her coffee cup down in its saucer with a decisive clank and smiles at him, and he swallows all his protests back down. She's already got an answer for him, in the form of a suit which arrives at his front door exactly two hours before the gala is schedule to start. _My mother has decided that she wants to meet you_ , a note pinned to the front reads in neat script, _and there are very few things capable of stopping her._

When he finally meets Jemma's mother, he agrees wholeheartedly. Few things short of a massive granite mountain would be able to stop Melinda May and even then, he would have his doubts. “Mr. Fitz,” she says. “I've heard about your writing.”

“Really?” Fitz stammers.

“One of the professors at St. Jude's mentioned it. So did Jemma,” May says. She's wearing a perfectly tailored suit and five-inch heels and everyone in the room keeps on looking over at her nervously. Fitz thinks that he understands a lot more about Jemma more.

“She said all bad things, I hope.” Fitz laughs. It's incredibly awkward.

“Not entirely.” With that, May moves on and he's dismissed to hover by the canapes and wonder if they check ID at the open bar. (They don't.) He's had a glass and a half of champagne by the time he sees Jemma again, radiant in slinky silver, and maybe that's why he goes on to talk to her where anyone could see. When he crosses the room towards her, Jemma gives him a strange look and raises her eyes to the heavens as if she's imploring them to rescue her from him. It's a familiar expression, one that he's seen time after time when he puts too much salt on his fries or says something about her beloved Katharine Hepburn or reaches for the wrong book at the Strand, but Fitz doesn't mind it nearly as much now. If he didn't know better, he would say that there's something fond about it. 

“I see that your suit survived,” she says and sips at her champagne delicately.

“Not as well as your dress. You look beautiful, Simmons,” Fitz blurts out and feels a hot blush spread up his cheeks. She is beautiful, like something out of one of the black-and-white movies she loves. He just shouldn't be the one to tell her that. Jemma doesn't say anything back but she gives him a small, delicate smile, so frail that it wouldn't have been a smile for anyone else. Four months ago, he would have missed the smile entirely. Now he knows the curves and cracks of her face well enough to spot it and Fitz's fingers briefly itch for a pencil or for the keys of his typewriter to capture it. Then her smile's gone and she's leaning back against a column, framing herself perfectly, and she's on display again. Jemma seems especially brittle tonight and Fitz wonders if she would shatter if he touched her. (Not that he wants to touch her. If he even brushed his hand against those sharp edges, he would bleed.)

“And you also survived your encounter with my mother,” she observes. “Quite the feat.”

“She said that you mentioned my writing and that you said it wasn't completely terrible,” Fitz says smugly. They're back on familiar ground now. “I may have fainted away with the shock.”

“Well, it isn't completely terrible. You could write a book in fifteen years or so.”

“Only fifteen? Last time you said twenty.”

“Maybe you're improving.” She glances across the ballroom and drapes herself a little more elegantly against the column. Jemma's putting herself on display for someone and when Fitz glances in the same direction as her, he sees who. Trip is holding uncomfortable court amidst a crowd of people who look like they wouldn't be out-of-place on the cover of some business magazine, dotted with girls (and some boys) who shoot him sideways admiring looks and laugh too loudly at his jokes. He just got back from Europe about a week and a half ago and according to the gossip blog that Fitz doesn't want to admit he reads, Trip's been busy being wined and dined by half the town, charming them with anecdotes about climbing Swiss Alps. He seems much older than at the beginning of the summer, suddenly, but then maybe they all do.

“Does he need you to rescue him?” Fitz asks. Trip's smile is just a little too wide and judging by his energetic hand gestures, he's currently making his way through the same story Fitz has seen him tell at least three times this night. Right now, it's the hand gesture that accompanies the bit about the goats.

“He's not mine to rescue anymore. You could do it,” Jemma suggests. “You're friends, aren't you? Trip's friends with everybody.”

“Trip likes me!” Fitz protests. They'd mostly hung out in a group, him and Skye and Trip and Jemma, but Trip had kept on talking to him even after the breakup with Skye. He'd gotten regular weekend coffees with Trip, sat through an entire Mets game while Trip enthusiastically explained all the rules, and on one memorable occasion, even tried to go for a run in Central Park with him. Fitz had ended up panting and gasping less than a mile in while Trip effortlessly jogged on. Afterward, Trip had tried to get him to drink some kind of grainy green smoothie. 

“Well, there's no accounting for taste, is there?” And there's the Jemma Simmons that he knows and...tolerates. Likes most days, if he's honest with himself. “All my friends seem to like you and I can't fathom why.”

“I am extremely likable.” Fitz shifts anxiously from foot to foot and tries not to look like he's scanning the room for Skye. It isn't that he wants to see her, but more that he needs to. Just to make sure that she's all right, that the bright lights and hazy air of Southern California haven't sent her reeling off course and down the rabbit hole. He's never been out to Los Angeles but in his head (in all the novels set in Hollywood he's read), it's a dangerously seductive place. The city lures you in with the promise of your name in lights and love that's consecrated by the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean and attention that's just as constant as the hot California sun, people who'll never leave you alone. And then it all gets lost in the smog and goes to pieces when all the lights are shut off and the special effects turned off for the night. He knows that Skye's always wanted a family, from the hungry way she used to listen to him talk about Phil and Bobbi, and she's not going to find it out West. There's also the lingering memory in the back of his mind of Jemma, walking back from the theater one warm July night and talking to the lampposts and not to him. She'd told him that Skye had left for Connecticut after she'd gone out one night and woke up in the hospital with no memory of the night before.

Skye isn't his to worry about anymore, but he does it anyway.

Then he spots her, glowing and in blue and talking to a guy who probably has better developed muscles in his little finger than Fitz has in his entire body. He'd complain to Jemma about it, except for the fact that she'd just tell him that his science was inaccurate. He turns to her anyway, only to find that she's gone. When Fitz finally sees her again, she's talking to a dark-haired boy and looks like she doesn't fit inside her own skin.

 

_He_ twists her up and Jemma isn't sure if she likes it anymore. “You know that you'd do so much more with me than you would ever accomplish on your own,” he says, voice smooth as a snake. “We're inevitable, Jemma. The king and queen on the chess board.”

“Clearly, you don't know much about chess. The queen does so much more than the king ever can. The only thing stopping her from winning the whole thing is her need to protect the king.” Jemma straightens her shoulders and keeps her hands still at her sides. If she fidgets with her hair, or adjusts her dress, or lets him move even closer, he'll take all he can get. Pawns, rooks, bishops, knights, and all. She's been playing chess with him for what seems like forever and now, still raw around the edges from losing Trip, he thinks that he's a move or two away from checkmate. Jemma thinks that it might be time to tip over the board and walk away.

“So you want to protect me?” He smiles, the cat that got someone else's canary. 

“I need to protect other people from you,” she counters. “You bring out the worst in them.”

“But not in you. You're better with me, I promise.” He reaches out to touch her, hand ghosting along the lines of her bracelets and nearly closing around her wrist, and she jerks away sharply.

“Only according to you. I don't like the person that you want me to be,” Jemma says. “So I think I'm going to try my best to not be her anymore.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she spots Fitz seemingly heading towards them. Fitz really can't be coming to talk to her, can he? It must be a Brooklyn thing. Anyone else would have been instantly deterred by the quietly menacing looks that are currently being shot his way. Then she pauses for a moment, eyes somehow locked on Fitz, and realizes that anyone else doesn't really mean anyone, just the small closed circle of people that flirt and fuck and stab each other in the back in endless cycles. Suddenly her chess game feels like it might float away into thin air, dissolved by one direct look from Fitz's blue eyes, and Jemma breathes. In and out. She looks at him and sees where the line of his chin will go to fat in ten years, how his eyes will narrow and become flinty, the way that that gold watch will eventually bite into his skin. And she doesn't care. Because maybe some things are inevitable, but going down this dark path isn't. 

“Simmons!” Fitz says cheerfully and offers her a glass of champagne. “I've been sent by your mother to summon you.”

Fitz is lying through his teeth, of course. If her mother sent anyone, it would be Skye or she'd simply retrieve Jemma herself. Everyone knows that and the sheer baldfaced scale of Fitz's lie leaves Jemma grudgingly impressed. So she takes the champagne and his arm and walks away without looking back once. When they're far enough away, she takes his arm and tugs him into an alcove, tapping one high-heeled foot and waiting for an explanation. Fitz caves in about ten seconds.

“You didn't look very happy talking to him, so I thought I'd give you an out,” he shrugs and jams his hands into his pockets. Jemma barely resists the urge to pull his hands back out and tell him that he's ruining the lines of the suit. (It's a nice suit and he looks nicer than he should in it.) “Not a big deal.”

“I don't need a knight in shining armor.” 

“I know. If you were locked in a tower, you'd climb down and slay the dragon yourself using a pair of designer heels. I'm not...I just—I thought maybe I could help,” he admits. “And I wanted to.”

“Maybe you did.”

Fitz stays by her side for most of the night, only drifting away when she goes to talk to Skye, and he proves to be a much better gala companion than she would have imagined. He has a sharp tongue when he thinks no one can hear him, pinning down the inhabitants of the Upper East Side like he's diagramming them out on a chalkboard, and Jemma even finds herself laughing once or twice. (Four times, at most. It wouldn't do to stroke his ego too much.) He fetches her tiny plates of food and steers her away from the flowers that make her sneeze and offers up his suit jacket when someone flings the huge French doors open and he sees her shiver. She refuses, of course. She couldn't possibly ruin the look of the suit.

Things are different after the gala. She no longer expects that he'll melt away once they start school in the fall, disappear into the flannel-wearing, performance art-wearing mass of NYU. Instead she sends him a message a week into the semester. _I'm bored, Leopold_ , it reads.

_What do you expect me to do about it?_ he replies.

_There's an author event at the Strand I want to go to. I'll require your services as a holder of books and warder off of hipsters._

By the end of freshman year, they are irrevocably friends. It could be much worse. They have a longstanding coffee date on Tuesday afternoons, when neither of them have class and when there are fewer people around to give them dirty looks if their arguments get too loud. They drink coffee and eat scones all over Manhattan and on a few memorable occasions, Brooklyn. Any of the other three boroughs are completely out of the question. Fitz goes with her to see exhibits at what seems like nearly every museum in the city and when they both finally manage to get Van Gogh's Starry Night all to themselves at MOMA, they stand silently next to each other and gaze with wide eyes. And she discovers something. 

Underneath the post-modernist literary critiques that he delivers with an insufferable smirk on his face and how he eye rolls his way through every single party she invites him to, Leo Fitz is in love with the wonder of the universe. She lets him drag her to a show at the planetarium, where he stares up at the stars and mouths the words along with the recording. “You like astronomy?” she asks him afterward as they walk through Central Park, reds and oranges and yellows crunching underneath the heels of her boots.

“I had a phase when I was younger, like most geeky kids did. I did all these watercolors of galaxies that my dad kept pinned up on the fridge for way too long.” A faint blush spreads down Fitz's neck. “Right next to Bobbi's karate certificates and science fair prizes. We couldn't actually see the fridge after a while.”

“My mom and I used to watch the stars late at night. She knew all the stories for the different constellations because Andrew told them to her when they first started dating. I don't really remember him,” Jemma says quietly. Fitz just nods and resists the urge to reach out and squeeze her hand. He's heard about Andrew Garner, Melinda May's husband and the top psychiatrist killed trying to defuse a hostage situation just a year after Andrew and Melinda had adopted Jemma. It's one of those topics that the New York elite intently avoid in conversation, acting like it's always just been Melinda and Jemma, and Fitz thinks that he could probably count the number of times he's heard Dr. Garner's name mentioned on one hand. 

“I'm sorry. He—he probably would've been really proud of you,” Fitz offers.

“You really think so?”

“Of course I do.” And, he realizes later with a sudden shock, he really does. Jemma may be infuriating and haughty and hold everyone around her to impossibly high standards but she's also smart and vibrant and strong. He's seen her overhear things that would have made anyone else cry and walk right into the conversation with perfect posture and a witty remark. She'll tilt her chin straight up and dare everyone to say all the things they don't like about her to her face. 

Fitz thinks that he might just like being around her. 

 

Skye nearly drops her iced coffee when Jemma tells her that she and Fitz have been hanging out. Jemma used to barely tolerate him and now she's going to exhibits and seeing classic movies with Skye's ex-boyfriend? Skye swallows down something hot and nasty in her chest and she's not sure exactly who she's being possessive of. Jemma has been her best friend since kindergarten, when Skye's mom forgot to pack her a lunch and Jemma split her perfectly packed bento box with Skye and made sure that she got to color with her favorite blue crayon. And Fitz...Fitz may not technically be hers but somehow he still somehow kind of is. She was his first love, she knows it, and Skye has gone through so many boys who didn't even seem to like her in the end and maybe she wants to hang on to that for a little while longer. They weren't meant to be in the end, too many rough edges that didn't click together, too much of a gaping chasm between the way she saw the world and the way he did, but she'll always remember the way that he wrote about her, making her sound like some kind of superhero. She still has one of his stories, eight handwritten pages on yellow ruled paper, tucked in the back of one of her drawers. 

“You liked him enough to date him,” Jemma points out and daintily bites into her macaron. “Things are so much less interesting without you around. I had to turn to Brooklyn to keep myself entertained.”

“It's just so weird,” Skye says. “I imagined you'd be busy scheming away with--”

“No, that's done,” Jemma interrupts. “He never...he kept on telling me that we were inevitable, that we were just the same, that we were meant to be but he never said exactly what I was like. Or why he wanted me in the first place.”

“How could he not?” Skye demands, suddenly feeling defensive of her best friend. “You're beautiful and scarily smart and determined and nice—I mean, you're nice to the people who deserve it. Everyone should want you.”

“No, I think that everyone wants you,” Jemma corrects. “You're the Golden Girl, S.”

“Is that what that stupid gossip blog's calling me now?” Skye scowls when Jemma reluctantly nods. “You know, I could probably hack into their servers and find out who's behind all of it.”

“Remember the last time you tried to hack into something?” Jemma raises an eyebrow and Skye's about to protest that it really wasn't her fault that the FBI decided to investigate (it must have been a slow day at the bureau), but then Jemma raises both eyebrows and the subject is definitively closed. Instead, they talk about Skye's work out in California last summer and how she's planning to go back and intern again as soon as she can. She worked at a TV studio, on this superhero TV series that was in development, and she's strangely attached to it now, especially to the nearly unknown actress they cast as one of the leads. Jemma's asked her if she wants to work in Hollywood after she graduates and even though Skye's never really thought about the future in any kind of concrete terms, she likes the sound of it. 

Jemma asks her questions about her latest boyfriend, the yoga classes she's taking, the new recipes she's trying to master, the clubs she went out to last weekend and Skye knows that Jemma worries about her. This is the way they work: Skye screws things up and Jemma tries to fix them. And Skye does screw things up and sometimes they screw her up too, whether it's the boys who have a way of leaving her or the parents who are nothing like what she imagines they could be or the mistakes she makes when she's trying to do the right thing. And yet, right now, breathing in the fresh May air and sipping her milky coffee across from Jemma, she thinks that she's going to be okay and more than anything, she wants to find a way to tell her best friend that. Because sometimes Skye worries about Jemma too.

“Is she doing okay?” she asks Trip when they run into each other on Fifth Avenue. He's buying a birthday present for his mother and she's shopping to avoid spending time with hers. “Jemma? She looks tired.”

“I...I think so. It's taken us a while to get back to being friends, you know? We hang out sometimes but she doesn't really talk to me like she used to.” Trip sighs and runs a hand distractedly over a shelf of scarves. “I miss her.”

“She'll get there. You still love each other, don't you?” Skye goes on when Trip nods. “You're just not in love with each other anymore and that's okay. I mean, it was really shitty when it happened and it'll probably be really shitty for a while after that but then you'll talk and you'll listen and you'll work it out and someday you'll be friends again.”

“You really believe that?” Trip asks hopefully and turns to look at her. Somehow he's gotten even more handsome—wide shoulders and wider smile, kind eyes that make something snag inside her chest—and for a moment she wants him so badly that every part of her seems to ache. Skye's felt this way before, when he spun her around the dance floor at the Barton wedding and collected a plate of hors d'oeuvres for her when she complained that she couldn't walk anymore in her heels. And she knows exactly where feeling this way took them. Her dress and his tie crumpled on the floor, the plum-colored marks on her neck that she should have stopped him from giving her, the shattered look on Jemma's face when she found out. For those few hours that she was with Trip, Skye felt almost painfully _real_ , like she'd only ever been in the here and the now and not in the world of what-if's and unknowns that seemed to populate her head. Trip had seen her, not the photos splashed across the pages of The Rising Tide or the flawless version that populated Fitz's notebooks, and he hadn't looked away.

“Of course I do.” Skye looks down at the floor and tries hard not to blush.

“Want to tell me that again over coffee? I've missed talking to you, Skye,” Trip admits.

And she knows that she shouldn't but she says yes anyway. And they keep on getting coffee, and lunch, and dinner. They go to the tiny dim sum places in Chinatown and see who can slurp their soup dumplings the loudest, they watch cheesy heist movies in run-down repertory theaters, they talk their way on to a brewery tour, and on one memorable occasion, she actually manages to keep up with him on a run through the park. 

“Damn,” Trip says as they slowly jog to a halt. “What were you doing out there in California? Triathlons?”

“I just stopped treating my body like shit for a while. Went running, swam on the beach, drank a lot of smoothies, ate some weird healthy stuff. Jemma's mom keeps on asking me to come to her morning workouts now,” Skye says and tries not to make it sound like a big deal. May's approval is...well, almost uncomfortably important to her. She keeps on finding herself looking to the older woman for her subtle nods and hints of a smile, for the few sentences she says at the end of each workout.

“Well, it's impressive. What to show off your skills tonight? My parents are throwing a big party and I think I'm in need of a dance partner. I'd really like it to be you,” Trip adds, voice softer.

She probably shouldn't. They probably shouldn't. But they do anyway and when Trip kisses her (sweetly, hesitantly, like he's asking for permission in a way no one else ever has), Skye feels so purely, simply happy that all she wants to do is tell Jemma about it. 

When she finally does, Jemma stares down at her coffee for a good five minutes and then looks up, smiles, and says “I suppose I'll have to go after one of your ex-boyfriends now, won't I?”

 

Fitz only realizes that he thinks Jemma's beautiful when he finds himself writing about her. He doesn't mean to do it. She slips into the clash of his typewriter keys and the spaces between the lines and when he pulls the piece of paper free and reads it at the end of the day, somehow she's found her way in there. _There's something dangerous about her smile and Dylan should know better, but all he wants is to find out what it is. But it's not the shark-tooth smile that she shows the world that has his heart racing frantically and his mind going in circles. It's the smile underneath it, the one that's as fragile as glass, that he wants to keep safe._

Fitz scowls down at the piece of paper, crumples it up, and throws it into his trash. The thud it makes isn't satisfactory in the least.

Then, instead of staring at another blank sheet of paper, he pulls his notebooks out of the cavernous desk drawer he keeps them in and starts going through each one. Jemma's there in each and every one, tucked between the pages and peering out from the margins, and Fitz barely resists the urge to slam his head against the desk. It's not her exactly, never quite recognizable enough for him to actually realize what he's doing, but little glimpses of her. A jeweled headband set in a minor character's dark hair, a reference to Breakfast at Tiffany's, a sentence that sounds uncomfortably like something she'd say. And as he goes on and on through the months, she appears more and more until she's nearly overwhelming each page and as he writes her and writes her without knowing it, she seems to draw every word on the page towards her. If Skye's a supernova in his writing, Jemma's a whole galaxy. 

“How's the Great American Novel coming?” his dad asks, peering cheerfully around the door. Fitz would be snappy about it if it weren't for the fact that Phil actually believes Fitz is writing the Great American Novel. His own tastes lean a lot more towards spy thrillers but he's sat through at least three drafts of the same short story and pronounced each one perfection.

“ 'S not a novel,” Fitz grumbles. “Not yet.”

“We're getting Thai food,” Bobbi says enticingly and joins his dad at the door. She's back for spring break, her arrival heralded by the appearance of one very short Brit strumming a guitar beneath her window. (Last night, she asked Fitz if she could borrow one of the discarded novel drafts to hurl down at him but she hadn't thrown it too hard.) “Come out of the writing cave and talk to us.”

He's silent through most of dinner, morosely pushing yellow curry around his plate, and afterward Bobbi marches into his room and commandeers a chair, just like she used to do when he was getting bullied in middle school and she wanted names so she could beat them up. She sits there, silent, and waits for him to crack.

“I wrote about something that I shouldn't have,” Fitz finally says.

“Let me guess: starts with a J, ends with an S, wears designer headbands?”

“Look, it's not...it's not that kind of thing. I don't even know what it is or how I feel or what I'm supposed to feel. I—I just keep on writing about her. Even when I'm not trying to write about her. Look!” Fitz yanks the drawer open and tosses one of his notebooks over to Bobbi, who reads it with a perfectly still face. “And it's not even...it doesn't make sense. It's not a satisfying narrative trope.”

“Not a satisfying narrative trope?” Bobbi props her head on her hand and gives him another look. “There's no editor looking over your shoulder here, Fitz. Things don't have to check off a series of boxes or fit some predetermined story arc. They just have to be right.”

“I know how stories work, okay? And I'm pretty sure that our story doesn't.”

The next time that he sees Jemma, it feels like his heart's trying to wrench itself out of his chest and Fitz has the horrifying thought that maybe everything he's written down is true. Maybe he does think she's beautiful, maybe she does draw the light towards her when she moves, and maybe he's completely screwed. She'll never have the same tightening in her chest and unruly thoughts in her head, never even think about feeling the same way that he does. Jemma leads a perfectly ordered life and his place in it was determined long ago. Telling her would just be unfair. So instead Fitz hides in his room with his typewriter and pounds out page after page. The only place where he and Jemma belong together is a fictional one. 

 

As it turns out, he's right. Jemma meets a prince in Paris over spring break and six months later, she's engaged. There's a massive diamond ring on her left hand and a bodyguard assigned to her to keep the paparazzi away and a gown that used to belong to Grace Kelly and she is definitively, absolutely happy. She swears. 

“It's like something out of an old movie,” she tells Skye over brunch, tilting her hand to see how the diamond catches the light again. She still hasn't become used to the weight of it on her hand and the stone's so huge that it scratches people if she's not careful. “I feel like I'm Audrey Hepburn in _Roman Holiday_.”

“Isn't that the one where she runs away from being a princess?” Skye asks quizzically.

“Only temporarily. Anyway, the point really isn't about the plot. I just feel glamorous. Special,” Jemma says and tries to ignore her best friend's distinct lack of enthusiasm. Funny, how the only people who seem to be really interested in her engagement are journalists. 

“You were always special, Jemma.” Skye puts down her fork with a decisive clang and reaches across the table to grasp Jemma's hand. “You really love him, don't you? You're doing this because you want to?”

“Of course I am,” she promises and hopes that it sounds like the truth. 

Jemma thinks that she loves Louis. He's handsome and smart and kind and generous. They met when they were looking at the same painting at the Louvre and the first time he took her out to dinner, he insisted on pulling out her chair for her and asked her all about what she loved. Every hour with him seems to go perfectly, from the evenings they spend at the opera to his face the first time he tried kimchi to the first night they slept together. (Candles and rose petals and champagne and everything her sixteen-year-old self yearned for and didn't get.) There's nothing wrong with him in any way and when she wakes up each morning, Jemma tells herself that this is what she's been waiting for all her life, the fairy-tale ending. She's always been a perfectionist, after all, and what could be more perfect than becoming a princess?

True, Trip and Skye think that she's rushing into things, his family thinks that she's only after the crown and the money, her own mother pointedly doesn't say much about it, and Fitz...she's barely seen Fitz lately, especially after the engagement was announced. Or even since before the engagement, if she's honest with herself. She and Fitz spent all of the fall and winter together, in marble museum halls and tiny tiled diners that she can't actually believe she went to and the towering shelves of the Strand. When she got sick and couldn't see anyone for a week, he sent her matzo ball soup from his favorite deli and then called her up and watched a movie on the phone with her. “You get to pick,” he said. “You're the one hacking up her own lungs.”

“I do not hack,” she corrected. “I delicately cough. And we're watching The African Queen. I'll hang up if you say anything about the snakes.”

But in the spring, something changed. Their coffee dates slowly slipped from once a week to once a month, he took hours to reply to her phone messages, and when she asked him to see the Pre-Raphaelite exhibit at the Met with her, he actually said no. Fitz loves the Pre-Raphaelites, all those literary references and ethereal women. He says that he's been working on his novel and that he doesn't have much time to see anyone. (Or to let anyone see his novel—she's asked and he just shoves his notebooks deep down in his bag like she's about to snatch them out of his hands.) She half wants to ask Trip if he's seen Fitz or even scroll through the pages of the Rising Tide to see if there's any references to Lonely Boy, but Jemma doesn't chase after people. They chase after her. 

So instead she grits her teeth and smiles through another wedding dress fitting and cake tasting and session with her wedding planner. Jemma's always known what's best for her and this—the perfect wedding with the perfect man—is so right that it almost needs something to go wrong. Maybe that's the problem. Louis is so unrelentingly perfect, so ready to concede the point and tell her that she's right, that she almost finds herself longing for someone to argue with. 

“You're happy, Jemma?” her mother asks her. It seems to be the question that everyone asks her, from the paparazzi that now crowd the steps of their townhouse to Wanda, the girl in her Victorian Novelists class who wears too much jewelry and that Jemma likes in spite of it, to Skye, hesitantly sipping champagne as Jemma spins around in a white dress.

“Of course I'm happy,” Jemma says through gritted teeth. “Who wouldn't be?”

“You haven't been sleeping much,” May points out. “I have some tea you can try if you want.”

“I don't need tea. What I need is for this wedding to be over already!” Jemma snaps. “If I have to give one more interview about how I managed to land a prince—no one ever thinks that he might be lucky to get me too—or have to read another headline about how I can't fit into my wedding dress or god forbid, sit through one more dinner with his parents waiting for me to use the wrong fork--”

“Marriage won't make your in-laws go away, you know. Usually it results in them being around even more,” May says dryly. “You could always just elope. That's what Andrew and I did—drove straight to Las Vegas and got married by an Elvis impersonator.”

“You got married by an Elvis impersonator?” Jemma sits straight up and gapes at her mother. 

“His version of “Love Me Tender” wasn't bad.” May smiles, just a little. “We were really young. A little reckless and very in love. Tell me, would you still marry Louis in Las Vegas at a drive-through chapel?”

“I wouldn't marry anyone in Las Vegas.” Jemma laughs and tosses her hair over one shoulder. “Let me guess, did you clean up at blackjack too?”

Her mother lets Jemma distract her yet the thought's still there, buzzing around in the back of her head. Would she still marry Louis if he wasn't a prince? She likes to think she would but tossing and turning in her queen-size bed late at night, she's not always sure. 

A week before her wedding, Fitz rings her doorbell. “I wanted to see how you were doing,” he says and blinks innocently up at her. “I brought croissants.”

“I'm getting married in a week, Leopold. I can't possibly eat a croissant,” she informs him. “Or I'll be murdered by the entire royal family of Monaco.”

“They're plum hazelnut,” he says weakly and holds up the white paper bag.

“Croissants don't make up for the fact that you nearly disappeared for months.” Jemma moves to block the door completely and glares at him, hands on her hips. “I hope you at least have a novel to show for it.”

“I do actually. And a, uh, a book deal. It's coming out soon.” Fitz taps his fingers nervously against one thigh and tries to smooth his hair down with his other hand. Clearly, writing a book didn't leave any time for getting a proper haircut. He's got stubble now too, that makes his jawline look a little more defined, his face a little older, and Jemma thinks that she isn't entirely opposed to it.

“Congratulations. Is anyone we know in it?” she asks. His writing has always had an autobiographical tilt to it, like he's taken the world that they all know and sent it spinning until everything settles back just a little out of place. Reading his work is like seeing the world that she knows she knows by heart all over again and it's...disorienting. Strange. Not entirely unpleasant. 

“No one who's recognizable enough that they could sue me for it. Do you want to get a copy when it comes out?” he asks, grinning.

“Only if it's good.” It'd be so easy to fall back into their old routine, the sharp looks and sharper remarks, and Jemma nearly shifts to the side to let him in, to talk and argue and attempt to get her elaborate espresso machine to produce coffee. Then she thinks about the unanswered messages and the vague details Fitz gave her whenever she asked about his writing and the way he won't meet her eyes even now. “Where were you, Fitz? Really?”

“I told you, I was writing a book. Figuring things out. I...I'm sorry, Jemma. I just...” he trails off, runs a hand through his hair until it stands straight up.

“You just what?”

“Are you really getting married on Saturday?” he blurts out. 

“Everyone keeps on asking me that, you know. It's not exactly sparkling conversation,” Jemma says and wonders if he really thinks she'll change her answer for him. “And yes, yes I am.” 

“All right, then. I—I hope you'll be very happy.” Fitz turns and walks away and Jemma nearly calls after him, about to tell him that he can't just...what? Tell her that his book is getting published? Wish her a happy marriage? This has been always the problem with them, the way they twist and turn and shake off any kind of proper definition. Nearly two years later, she still doesn't have a classification for Leo Fitz, no words to pin him down and stick a neat label on, and she thinks that maybe that's why she's still fascinated with him. Louis isn't like that, Louis is all neat lines and established stories and boxes that he methodically checks off one by one, and Jemma likes that. She finds it comforting. She really does.

In the end, she doesn't say anything. (In the end, it'll be his book that says it all for them.)

Jemma is standing in the foyer of Saint Patrick's Cathedral in a massive white dress, holding a bouquet of roses that have been specially bred for her and wearing a tiara that once belonged to Grace Kelly when she realizes that she doesn't want to get married. Her timing is off, to say the least.

“Jemma?” Skye says slowly. “Jem, are you okay? You're looking a little pale.”

“I—I can't get married,” she breathes. “Everything is perfect and I'm about to be a princess and I can't get married because everything is perfect.”

“Sorry?” Skye frowns at her and then rushes over to help Jemma lower herself down onto an overstuffed pouf when she starts to wobble. “If everything's perfect, then what's wrong?”

“Everything!” Her tiara is digging into her head and she can't breathe in this dress and the flowers smell sickly sweet and overblown and Jemma grabs for Skye's hand and holds on tight. The whole time, everything's been perfect but she's not sure if anything has ever been real. She's never drunk coffee in silence with Louis, or watched a movie on the couch, or just existed side by side. They've never had a single argument, something which she used to be proud of. They've never lived together or even tried spending more than twenty-four consecutive hours together—in fact, he's never spent more than a night or two in her apartment and his family would frown upon it terribly if she spent the night at his townhouse. For one staggering moment, Jemma wonders if she really even knows him and when she thinks of walking down the aisle towards him, of letting him slip the antique gold wedding band on her finger, nausea rises up from deep in her stomach. There's so many things that she wants to do before she gets married, she thinks frantically. She wants to finish her degree and then go out and get another one, she wants to go to the Seychelles and see how many different species of fish she can identify, she wants to learn Mandarin and see the expression on her mother's face, she wants to screw up and fix things without a million eyes fixed on her. And maybe if she was young and stupid and madly in love, maybe if Louis made her blood hum and her heart race, maybe none of those things would matter. Only she's been so busy thinking about how perfect he is to ask if he's perfect for her and she doesn't think about him when he's not there and she doesn't prolong each last kiss to have a minute here with him and maybe she loves the idea of it all more than him. Jemma has always been in love with ideas, after all, and not with their messier realities. 

“Okay. Okay. And you're—you're sure? Because if you are, we can definitely do the runaway bride thing but if you're not and we end up turning around halfway to JFK, we'll have one very angry cabdriver and a massive traffic jam on our hands.” Skye's trying to make her laugh. It's definitely not going to work.

“I don't know,” Jemma confesses. Because she really doesn't, because she can't walk out on the wedding of the century but she can't marry someone that she might not be in love with but she can't let him wait for her to walk down the aisle but she can't marry him. “Just...just create a distraction? I know you're good at doing that.”

Skye just nods, confused, and heads into the church. Thirty seconds later, Jemma rushes outside, hails the nearest taxi, and asks the driver to take her to Brooklyn. 

She can tell that Fitz is dying to ask her questions when she knocks on his door in her wedding gown but for once in his life, he keeps his mouth shut. He lets her curl up on his couch, the tulle and satin of her dress mushrooming out around her and the pins coming out of her hair, and eventually offers her some of his sister's old clothes after a good thirty minutes of the fabric rustling every time she breathes. The red plaid shirt and black yoga pants are almost comically oversized on her, the shirt falling almost to her knees and the pants neatly cuffed at her ankles, and that's why she can breathe in them. Fitz orders a huge amount of Chinese takeout and puts _Casablanca_ on the TV and doesn't say anything. For someone who loves arguing with her so much, he's rather good at letting her be and for a while, the only things they say to each other are requests to pass the moo shu pork and Jemma's wistful sight when Rick lets Ilsa walk away. 

“Don't you want to ask me why I'm not getting married?” Jemma finally says, voice creaky, after the credits are rolling on _Casablanca_. Somewhere over the course of the movie, she's inched close enough to rest her head on his shoulder, lightly enough that she could jerk away in an instant and deny it if she needed to. His shoulders aren't nearly as wide as Trip's or even Louis' but her head fits rather neatly into the space between his neck and shoulder.

Fitz shrugs and Jemma feels his voice echo through her bones as he starts to talk. “You're not getting married. That's enough for me.”

“I could have been a princess,” Jemma says quietly and draws her knees up to her chest. “Tiara and everything.”

“Fuck the tiara. You were always a princess,” Fitz says firmly. “And I think you're always going to be one.”

 

Fitz's book comes out in October and everyone in New York except for Jemma is talking about it. It's a matter of principle. The principle of avoiding the tight knot of feeling in her chest that Fitz seems to inspire. He sends her spinning off course, light-headed and giddy and strangely hopeful, as images spin through her head on a loop. Her hand linked through Fitz's as they walk down the street, his arms around her in the morning, the way his mouth might taste (coffee, with a heavy dose of milk and too much sugar). She's drunk on him, just a little, and she doesn't trust the feeling at all. After a long string of failed relationships, she doesn't quite trust any of her feelings.

So she deliberately forgets what people tell her about the book, clicks away from the headlines on the Rising Tide, and dismisses the rumors like last season's handbags. Until Fitz's sister marches up to Jemma in the middle of a bookstore, where Jemma is happily debating whether she wants to gamble on another Murakami novel and contemplating the merits of stopping by the bakery next door for a slice of pear tart afterward, and insists on turning her neatly ordered afternoon upside down.

“You're the star of Fitz's book,” Bobbi says. 

“I thought it was fictional. Avoiding lawsuits and all of that,” Jemma says and keeps her eyes determinedly on the shelves. “Besides, I haven't read it. I can only imagine how I come off in print.”

“You'd be surprised. I think you don't do so badly.” Bobbi says carefully and takes a step forward towards Jemma. “Look, I'm not saying that you have to do anything, because Fitz would kill me if I did. But this...this book is all he's ever going to say to you. And if you think you might be interested in hearing it, you should read it.”

Three days later, she caves and buys the book. It's not the novel she would have expected from Fitz, a little gossipy and a lot addictive, full of girls in designer dresses and men in handmade suits and containing one more catastrophic car accident than she expected Fitz would ever write. But it's good. There's a strand of wistfulness that runs through the whole thing, a hopeless, sweet yearning, and the kind of love story she never thought Fitz would write. And there, pirouetting in designer heels and capturing the narrator's heart against his will, is her. The name and a few of the details may be different but there she is, living in paper and ink. Jemma isn't sure if she wants to kiss Fitz or slap him.

She still hasn't made up her mind when she takes a taxi over to Brooklyn and appears on his doorstep. “I read the book,” she says and brandishes it at him. 

“And you're going to tell me all about the typo on page 127?” He's trying to look casual, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, but one foot is tapping madly against the floor.

“The one on page 258, actually.” Jemma steels herself, takes a breath. Maybe she can't trust what she feels and maybe he can't either, if he could only say it when he put the words in a fictional character's mouth, but maybe together they can trust each other more than they trust themselves. “You wrote a book about me. About us.”

“I did. Shouldn't you, ah—shouldn't you be in Manhattan?” Fitz asks quietly. “With the kinds of people that I write about?”

Jemma knows that she should make some kind of declaration, spell out her feelings in clear black and white, and yet all she can do is stand there with her heart in her throat. She's not used to feeling speechless around Leo Fitz. So instead she surges across the room and kisses him.

Fitz goes reeling back against the wall but then he's kissing her back urgently, one arm locked tight around her waist, hand radiating warmth where it's splayed across her back and the other hand tangled in her hair. She's kissing him like she's got years to make up for, nipping at his lower lip and hearing him gasp, hands sliding beneath that ridiculous flannel, mouth moving down to make her way along the line of his throat and suck dark marks into existence. Jemma's always scoffed at people who leave their presence etched across their lovers' skin and now all she wants is to leave her mark on him, claim him for all the world to see. It's the heat of him beneath her hands and his breath mingling with hers and their hearts thumping wildly. 

It's not perfect. The hem of her dress rips, he nearly trips getting them to his room. They argue, they make up, they argue again. They misunderstand each other, accidentally and willfully, and they make mistakes and sometimes more mistakes trying to fix them. And they kiss and they walk through Central Park holding hands and they talk for hours and hours into the night. And he makes her feel safe and she makes him feel brave and together they make each other feel loved. 

 

There are two things that Jemma Simmons knows about Leo Fitz. First, he may be the most infuriating person she has ever met. Second, she is madly, completely in love with him.


End file.
